Unpacking Privilege: The Other Side of Caste

Ravikant Kisana's ‘Meet the Savarnas’ is an important contribution to the field of critical caste studies, aiming to reverse the gaze from the marginalised to the privileged castes.

Caste in India is mostly researched and reported from the experience of the oppressed. Caste as a privilege is not understood well. How do caste elites respond to modernity? How do they understand culture, intimacy, love and tradition? Were their ideas, institutions and imaginations ever even capable of delivering upon the Great Indian Dream?

In Meet the Savarnas, Ravikant Kisana goes where few authors have dared: to document the lives, the concerns and crises of India’s urban elites, to frame the savarnas as a distinct social cohort, one that operates within itself and yet is oblivious of its own social rules, privileges and systems.

Unpacking Privilege: The Other Side of Caste - The Wire 

by Ravi Bharmouri

20/08/2025

Gadchiroli Sees Decline in Maoism, Increase in Mining

Gadchiroli, the 'Favourite District' of Devendra Fadnavis, Sees Decline in Maoism, Increase in Mining https://thewire.in/politics/gadchiroli-the-favourite-district-of-devendra-fadnavis-sees-decline-in-maoism-increase-in-mining by Santoshi Markam

Vinod Mandavi, an activist with the Adivasi Vikas Parishad of Potegaon, accused the Gadchiroli collector of fabricating gram sabha documents in 2010, to falsely demonstrate public consent for mining. Allegations suggest that such counterfeit gram sabha documents were produced with the assistance of village gram sevaks in Damakondawahi, located in the Bande area of the ​​Etapalli block.

In 2023, the police forcefully shut down the peaceful dharna organized by tribal members from over 70 villages, which had persisted for about eight months in opposition to the Surjagarh mining. The protest against the mine in Todgatta lasted for 255 days in 2023,  People were forcibly removed from the area, huts were vandalised, and 21 individuals – including women – were detained. They faced false charges and were held in Chandrapur jail for 17-18 days before being released on bail. 

 

Retotalising Capitalism

Retotalising Capitalism: A Very Short Introduction to its History https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/article/retotalising-capitalism-a-very-short-introduction-to-its-history/ Jairus Banaji  In my Brief History of Commercial Capitalism, I argued that, in retrospect, Marx turns out to have been wrong to think of Britain as the incarnation of industrial capital that subordinated commercial capital, since the latter was entrenched at the heart of the British economy (as Geoffrey Ingham argued in the eighties) and a much better incarnation would soon emerge with the Second Industrial Revolution when modern vertically integrated firms would undercut the position of merchant firms in both the U.S. and Germany.

Chayanov’s idea of the vertical concentration of capital as the form in which capitalist firms tended to establish a more widespread domination over household producers in the countryside.

Rural exodus has been a major theme of the postwar decades...in China, whole villages are demolished and peasants expected to cope with the resulting loss of land by buying unaffordable social insurance.   In India, the state would like to be able to have comparable powers of coercion, but the caste ties of most farming communities gives them considerable leverage politically and makes widespread coercion impossible. What we are witnessing is the end of the peasantry in any viable sense of that term, but not in the straightforward ways that were once seen as key drivers of this process in many predictions on the Left.

https://files.libcom.org/files/brenner.pdf peasantry’s failure : landlords  create large farms and to lease them to capitalist tenants who could afford to make capitalist investments’ and cultivate them with wage-labour